Several friends have told us not to plant sweet potatoes, as they attract inoshishi, or wild boar, which roam the Okutama hills and are never far away. A neighbour’s crop was totally wiped out, the story goes, by inoshishi that descended on it just the night before a planned harvest. We planted a few satsumaimo anyway, just out of optimism. We also discovered that nagaimo, the tubers you can eat fresh, have been established in our garden area, a legacy of previous tenants. So it was of concern in late August when a neighbour right on the edge of the forest, about 100 metres distant, reported that inoshishi had been rooting around under the big chestnut tree. They had also left a surprisingly large amount of faeces along the quiet bit of roadway there. Worried on several accounts, not least the safety of very elderly residents…